Politics

Biden tests positive for COVID, will self-isolate in Delaware, White House says

Published

2 hours ago

July 17, 2024

Press Room

Biden tests positive for COVID, will self-isolate in Delaware, White House says

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President Biden tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday following his first event in Las Vegas and will self-isolate in Delaware, the White House said.

Biden tested positive for the virus on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement. She said the president was “vaccinated and boosted” and was experiencing mild symptoms.

“He will be returning to Delaware where he will self-isolate and will continue to carry out all of his duties fully during that time,” Jean-Pierre said. “The White House will provide regular updates on the President’s status as he continues to carry out the full duties of the office while in isolation.”

A maskless Biden arrived at Harry Reid International Airport in Nevada on Wednesday afternoon, following the announcement of his diagnosis. Reporters questioned him about his condition as he walked to Air Force One.

COVID VACCINE COMPANIES TOLD TO FOCUS ON KP.2 FOR FALL SHOTS, PER FDA ANNOUNCEMENT

President Biden gives a thumbs up to reporters as he boards Air Force One in Nevada on Wednesday. The president said he “feels good” following his COVID diagnosis. (POOL)

“I feel good,” he told reporters.

In a post on X, Biden acknowledged his COVID diagnoses.

“I will be isolating as I recover, and during this time I will continue to work to get the job done for the American people,” he wrote.

Biden’s doctor said the president came down with upper respiratory symptoms, a runny nose and non-productive cough, with general mailaise.

“He felt okay for his first event of the day, but given that he was not feeling better, point of care testing for COVID-19 was conducted, and the results were positive for the COVID-19 virus,” the physician said in a statement shared by the White House. “Given this, the President will be self-isolating in accordance with CDC guidance for symptomatic individuals.”

His temperature was at 97.8 degrees, which is normal, the doctor said.

“The President has received his first dose of Paxlovid,” the White House said. “He will be self-isolating at his home in Rehoboth.”

Biden was slated to speak at the UnidosUS Annual Conference in Las Vegas, which draws thousands of Latino advocates to Nevada, a crucial swing-state.

“I was just on the phone with President Biden. And he shared his deep disappointment at not being able to join us this afternoon,” UnidosUS President and CEO Janet Murguía told attendees. “The president has been at many events as we all know and he just tested positive for COVID.”

The illness comes as Biden faces mounting pressure from within the Democratic Party, as well as donors, to drop out of the presidential race amid concerns about his physical and mental state.

Politics

Video: Biden Tests Positive for Covid

Published

2 hours ago

July 17, 2024

Press Room

new video loaded: Biden Tests Positive for Covid

transcript

Biden Tests Positive for Covid

President Biden said that he felt “good” after having tested positive for Covid.

: “How are you feeling?” “Mr. President, how do you feel?” “How do you feel?” “Good, I feel good.” “Do you have symptoms?” “Good, I feel good.”
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Politics

Before going MAGA, Vance made big money in San Francisco's tech world

Published

3 hours ago

July 17, 2024

Press Room

Before going MAGA, Vance made big money in San Francisco's tech world

The new Republican vice presidential nominee hangs his proverbial hat on hailing from Middletown, Ohio — a steel mill town in the heart of working-class America.

But for a few years, J.D. Vance joined the world of coastal elites, building a robust venture capitalist career and hobnobbing with some of the wealthiest tech leaders in the Bay Area.

Miles away from his Appalachian upbringing and long before he became former President Trump’s running mate, he was quietly building a Silicon Valley venture capital career and a life in San Francisco.

In an essay for the Atlantic in 2016, he contrasted that reality with conditions in his hometown:

“A few Saturdays ago, my wife and I spent the morning volunteering at a community garden in our San Francisco neighborhood. After a few hours of casual labor, we and the other volunteers dispersed to our respective destinations: tasty brunches, day trips to wine country, art-gallery tours. It was a perfectly normal day, by San Francisco standards.

“That very same Saturday, in the small Ohio town where I grew up, four people overdosed on heroin. A local police lieutenant coolly summarized the banality of it all: ‘It’s not all that unusual for a 24-hour period here.’ He was right: in Middletown, Ohio, that too is a perfectly normal day.”

The man who would later write the bestselling “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” — and become a darling of the MAGA right — was in his late 20s when he moved to San Francisco likely around 2013, coinciding with a major boom for Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter. Venture capital firms were also “rolling in money,” said Peter Leyden, founder of Reinvent Futures and host of the AI Age Begins discussion series.

Vance “was here in the absolute boom time of an incredible ride,” Leyden said. “Everybody was gaga about tech.”

The Silicon Valley tech community Vance entered was fairly liberal — perhaps less so than royal blue San Francisco nearby, but moderate left at least. Still, several tech leaders told the Times, the industry has also harbored a cohort of conservatives. And some of the more vocal members of this minority emerged during the Trump years, including Elon Musk, David Sacks and Peter Thiel — all of whom are now in Vance’s corner.

Vance worked for “the subgroup that was more the libertarian, right-wing crew,” Leyden said. “Now that group has morphed since that decade into an increasingly kind of Trumpian, more radicalized right.”

Observing the boom and bust of tech informed Vance’s view of market forces, as he recounted at a policy and tech conference in February. At one of his first jobs at Mithril Capital, for example, he observed how seemingly rapidly growing businesses were doomed to bust, simply because the incumbent businesses in the field were already so big.

“Something I didn’t realize at the time … is that the thing that was wrong with their business wasn’t their business. It’s that they existed in a fundamentally non-competitive market,” he said at the conference, adding later, “We want innovation and we want competition, and I think that it’s impossible to have one without the other.”

He came to believe that antitrust policy can be a useful tool for allowing new companies to enter a market. In the same speech, Vance lauded Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who has led antitrust investigations against major tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

The problem with having big companies like Google monopolizing information, Vance said, is that they can be biased — and that can be bad for democracy.

“The American people, I think, should have the right to decide,” Vance said. “And if the new mode of acquiring information is fundamentally biased, I think it’s a far bigger threat to democracy than almost anything that’s called a threat to democracy in 2024.”

While it’s impossible to detail the impact Vance’s San Francisco days made on his political worldview, they certainly affected his wallet. One of Vance’s strongest Bay Area supporters was also one of his first bosses: Thiel of PayPal and Facebook fame, as well as a Republican megadonor.

Siri Srinivas, a partner at a venture capitalist firm, noted Vance’s connections.

“He isn’t just another guy who was a VC and then wrote a book and became a senator,” Srinivas said. “He also worked very closely with someone who has worked to collect political power: Peter Thiel.”

Thiel owned Mithril Captial, where Vance began as a principal. In 2017, Vance moved back to Ohio to co-found Revolution, a venture capital firm focused on investing in Midwestern startups, according to Axios.

By 2020, Axios reported, Vance had raised $93 million, with backing from Thiel, to start Narya, another Ohio-based venture with a portfolio that includes Rumble.com, a social media and video platform popular with the far right. It hosts Trump’s Truth Social.

As Vance’s tech career was taking off, so too were his political ambitions. And though he labeled himself a “never Trumper” in 2016, the Ohio Republican was coming around to more Trumpian postures — much like his sponsor in Silicon Valley. Thiel, who had served on the board of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was become increasingly attuned to boosting Republican candidates, most notably donating to Trump.

Thiel donated $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign in 2022, which was also bolstered by Trump’s endorsement. Vance sailed to victory, serving as Ohio’s senator for less than two years before being tapped for as a vice presidential candidate.

His Silicon Valley connections have already come in handy in his political career. Several news outlets reported that Vance was key in helping Sacks organize a fundraiser in June that raised $12 million for the Trump campaign.

“As I look out at this convention, I see a party that is strong and unified behind President Donald J. Trump and his pick for Vice President, Sen. J.D. Vance,” Sacks said at the Republican National Convention on Monday night. “And what about the Democrats? … We know what their agenda will be: four more years of chaos and failure, both at home and abroad.”

“In my hometown of San Francisco,” Sacks continued, “Democrat rule has turned the streets of our beautiful city into a cesspool of crime, homeless encampments and open drug use.”

What remains to be seen is how much Vance’s tech background will influence administration policy. Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator from San Francisco, noted the new GOP platform explicitly supports the development of artificial intelligence and promises to “end Democrats’ unlawful and unAmerican Crypto crackdown.”

“I assume that was a very cynical play to try to get financial support from certain venture capitalists and tech people,” Wiener said.

But Srinivas, the venture capitalist, said Vance’s background in tech is at odds with his current politics.

“Most VCs are pro-science and having a technologist at the highest levels of government would be a huge win for Silicon Valley,” Srinivas said. “But, I’m not sure Vance is typical in that regard — he supported a ban on abortions in his last campaign, so I’m not sure he’s the best champion for science or technology.”

When asked at the February conference about how a future Republican administration would affect tech companies, Vance responded prophetically:

“As you know, personnel is policy, and a lot of what will determine Trump administration antitrust policy is who ultimately takes the reins the senior roles in the Trump administration, because they’re going to be the ones who are executing all this stuff.”

Politics

Six Questions We Asked 65 Republican Convention Attendees

Published

9 hours ago

July 17, 2024

Press Room

Six Questions We Asked 65 Republican Convention Attendees

With the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week, we wanted to learn how the party has changed and where it might be going, not from the officials who will give prime-time convention speeches, but in the words of some of its most committed members from across the country.

We spoke with 65 delegates and other attendees, a majority of whom were going to their first convention. We asked them their views on Donald J. Trump, the issues that drive them, what they’ve seen change, formative political moments, their favorite Republicans and who might be the next leader of the party. The initial conversations happened before the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump on Saturday, and we followed up with respondents at the convention.

1/6

How would you describe your feelings or level of enthusiasm about Donald Trump as the nominee?

Most of the attendees we spoke to said they were very enthusiastic about nominating him. Some said they were energized by his felony conviction in Manhattan in May. While the delegate selection process varies by state, the presumptive nominee has significant influence on who is chosen.

When asked at the convention how they felt about the shooting, many said they were even more determined to see Mr. Trump elected. Another common response was the belief that God had intervened to protect him. Some expressed hope that the political temperature would cool down, while others blamed the rhetoric of Mr. Trump’s detractors. “When you dehumanize people, it opens the door for others to take action in some ways,” said Matthew Rust, a delegate from Wisconsin.

In conversations leading up to the convention, some respondents expressed their support for Mr. Trump but acknowledged that he was not always their first choice, or that they preferred his policies to his personality.

Just one participant said he was not at all enthusiastic about Mr. Trump. Jason Watts, a former district party treasurer who was impeached after telling The New York Times that he had not voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 or 2020, says he feels like an abandoned orphan in the party.

2/6

Is there a particular issue that drives you toward or excites you about the Republican Party right now?

The economy was mentioned by more than 40 percent of respondents. Younger Republicans were more likely to be concerned about the cost of living. “It is near impossible to buy a home, to get married and afford to have kids,” said Stevie Giorno, a 24-year-old delegate from Tennessee.

Immigration was mentioned just as frequently (most respondents raised more than one driving issue), especially among older attendees. The responses track with a recent Times/Siena College poll in which more than half of Republicans said either the economy or immigration was the most important issue in deciding their vote.

Last week, Republican Party members approved a new, significantly pared down party platform reflective of Mr. Trump’s priorities. The document calls for mass deportations as well as sealing off the border to migrants.

Several respondents talked about the size of government and the national debt, long-held Republican priorities that were largely dropped from the party’s platform.

Abortion came up less frequently in the survey. The new party platform softens the party’s stance on the issue, reflecting Mr. Trump’s recent position that it should be handled by the states, upsetting many anti-abortion activists.

A handful of respondents mentioned issues surrounding education, gender and sexuality, including the Biden administration’s revised Title IX rules. A few respondents included election integrity as important to them, or offered that they believed in the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

3/6

Is there something you’ve seen change in the party?

Nearly all of the respondents hold positions within their local or state parties, or are members of groups for young Republicans or Republican women. Some hold public office. Many acknowledged an internal struggle in the party stemming from an influx of conservative activists.

Other respondents said they’d seen a sustained movement of the working class toward their party since blue-collar voters helped secure Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016.

When it comes to foreign conflicts like in Gaza and Ukraine, they say today’s party is less willing to be involved.

Some, but not all, who mentioned diversity said it had increased. In surveys over the past year, Mr. Trump has improved his standing with young and nonwhite voters.

4/6

Has there been a particularly meaningful or formative political moment in your life?

Most of the respondents said they had been Republicans their entire lives (or at least since they could vote). One said he campaigned door-to-door with his mother when he was still in the womb. Another recalled running a Reagan re-election campaign at his elementary school as a first grader.

Researchers have estimated that the years between age 14 and 24 are the most formative in shaping political preferences. Many of the major national or world events cited by respondents as meaningful occurred during their young adult years. Karl Von Batten, a 37-year-old lobbyist in Washington, remembered that after Sept. 11: “President George Bush got on a bullhorn and made a call for action. I joined the Army after that.”

For most, an election or a campaign event activated their involvement. For the few who were not lifelong Republicans, these moments motivated them to join the party.

The pandemic was also frequently mentioned.

5/6

Which Republican figure do you consider your favorite, or think aligns most closely with your positions?

Many respondents mentioned Mr. Trump. But more than half, including those born long after his presidency, mentioned Ronald Reagan. “Any true Republican should hold Reagan in the highest regard,” said Arik Amundsen, a 24-year-old delegate from Oklahoma.

Many people couldn’t name just one favorite. In all, they mentioned 40 Republicans. These were named more than once:

There were a wide range of others mentioned once, including several home-state lawmakers.

6/6

Is there someone you see as the next leader of the party after Trump?

Participants named 25 people they thought had potential to lead the party after Mr. Trump. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida received the most mentions, from more than one-third of respondents.

These responses were compiled before Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio was announced as Mr. Trump’s running mate, with some attendees saying they were waiting to see who the choice would be. The most common names mentioned after Mr. DeSantis were Vivek Ramaswamy, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley — all onetime primary contenders.